In the preceding pages, I have attempted to show that, far from simply abandoning the subject or dissolving it as a determined effect of pre-personal structures and processes as is so often affirmed by their critics, poststructuralist thinkers not only take the question of ‘the subject’ seriously, but also provide a variety of remarkably rich and heterogeneous engagements with it. As I mentioned in the Introduction, this can rightly give rise to the conclusion that there is not one poststructuralism, but many poststructuralisms, but I have suggested that there is a style of thought common to these endeavours that justifies talk of the former. Specifically, each thinker offers a sustained critique of the historically dominant foundational subject by questioning the epistemological, metaphysical and ontological assumptions underpinning it. Generally speaking, this entails a rejection of a metaphysics of presence or fixed substance, and, instead, the affirmation of flux, non-identity, embeddedness and epistemic ambiguity; which is not to say that knowledge is abandoned, only that how we think about the subject, including what the subject is, must also change so as to ‘start’ from continuous flux and alteration. Rather than a foundational constituting subject, the poststructuralist approach decentres the subject to embed it – in different ways – in pre-subjective processes and forces. Of course, what this entails is contentious and accounts for the heterogeneity of the previous chapters.

The subject is not, then, incidental or contingent to poststructuralist thought; it is fundamental and, in many respects, the theme or lens that best brings out what is unique about its style of thought. But to say that poststructuralist thinkers do not abandon the subject even as they seek to rethink it does not do justice to the depth of their inquiries. While they challenge long-standing prejudices regarding the subject, I have also shown that they produce subtle and detailed analyses of a range of topics that result from that rethinking, most notably relating to the issue of individual intentional agency.